But human rights advocates maintain that genocide or not, the Security Council must rule that crimes against humanity were, and are, being committed and must be referred to the international court for prosecution.Privately, British diplomats welcome intervention by the international court. The guru threw them into a tree and they stayed hanging there. The people said that he had no shadow.He had no priests for his temple but appointed four of what Mr Malviya calls “soldiers”, who he trained in the art of exorcism. Today’s priests are the descendants of those “soldiers” — the skills of exorcism have been handed down from generation to generation.According to Mr Malviya, the power of exorcism comes from a powerful mantra the guru taught his followers.Beating the “possessed” with a broom heaps insult on injury: being beaten with a broom is a great dishonour in Indian culture, because brooms used to be considered “untouchable”. The British Government has refused to do so, preferring to wait for the conclusions of an international commission of inquiry which reported back to the UN secretary general yesterday.The four-man panel, led by the Italian jurist, Antonio Cassese, was asked to investigate the Darfur killings, determine whether genocide had occurred and to identify perpetrators with a view to holding them accountable.

Not only has Tony Blair famously described Africa as “a scar on the conscience of the world,” he has set up an Africa Commission to provide solutions for the continent during the British G8 presidency.With a general election looming, the Government’s reaction to the ruling of the UN commission of inquiry will be an acid test of its independence from the right-wing agenda of the Bush administration.According to the head of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, if Britain looks for a compromise with Washington, it risks killing the court.The report now on Mr Annan’s desk may fudge the issue of genocide, which according to the textbooks is “the intentional destruction, in whole or in part, of a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such”. In July last year the Bush administration called it genocide, a term with legal connotations under the genocide convention which makes it imperative to act.For the Blair government, a founding member of the International Criminal Court which has nailed its colours to the mast on Africa during its presidency of the G8 leading industrialised countries, it will be a moment to decide whether to stand up to the Bush administration. One-third heard racial abuse while they and their relatives were being murdered or raped.After the Rwandan genocide in 1994, just as after the Holocaust when six million Jews were exterminated by the Nazis, the world said “never again”. Now, there is Darfur.Efforts to bring Sudan before the International Criminal Court – a move theoretically backed by the UK – have been undermined by the Bush administration’s hostility to the court which was specifically set up to judge those suspected of genocide and crimes against humanity.The United States has, at least, publicly branded these atrocities as genocide. Kofi Annan is expected to submit the report to the UN Security Council next Monday, when debate will be engaged between supporters of the International Criminal Court and its main detractor, the United States, which went so far as to unsign the treaty setting up the tribunal.The slaughter, ethnic cleansing and burning of villages began two years ago. Eight more villages in Darfur were torched in a single day by armed men in a concerted operation. No one knows how many were killed, but it is the latest evidence that inaction by the international community has emboldened the Janjaweed Arab militias and their backers in the Islamist government in Khartoum.
As arguments rage over who was to blame for the attacks five days ago, the UN is deciding whether the atrocities of the past two years amount to genocide.

Human rights organisations are using the occasion of Holocaust Day tomorrow to call for international war trials to help stop the crimes still being committed against the civilians of Darfur.Here are the facts More than 70,000 people have been killed. More than 1.6 million have been forced from their homes in a conflict that has been described as “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis”. The continuing violence has been so intense that international aid agencies have been forced to suspend their work after coming under attack.While the diplomats debate how to respond, the survivors of the atrocities are left traumatised, many in refugee camps. More than 60 per cent of refugees from Darfur have witnessed the killing of a family member by the men on horseback. Four out of every five people have witnessed the destruction of their villages. Two-thirds saw government planes laden with bombs target fleeing civilians. The attackers, as they have done so often, rampaged through terrified people, shouting “kill the slaves” They cried: “We have orders to kill all the blacks”.

During the night I don’t want to be alone because the ghost might come.” But she lives alone: she was widowed young, before she could have any children.The young man who was running around the temple platform as if trying to escape from something calling itself “Ganesh”. He was “exorcised” by the high priest, and afterwards he told his story.”I had this problem that I couldn’t sleep. In my sleep I used to feel that some one was strangling me.” A married man with three young children, his life had been brought to a standstill. “I didn’t know the ghost’s name but I felt he was trying to kill me,” he says.. But it is the ghost that is threatened with the shame of the beating, not the person whose body it has possessed.Meanwhile the pile of money at the high priest’s feet continues to grow. But whether you are a sceptic or a believer, there’s no doubting the suffering of the “possessed” is real, whatever its cause.

Dasri Bai, a gaunt 50-year-old woman, shuffles up and tells us she is possessed Her eyes are certainly haunted. “When the ghost comes into me my head spins and my whole body aches,” she said “I don’t know the ghost’s name, I can never remember it I am very scared. And however much they took, the sack never ran out.He made the blind see again. Once a British officer told the guru to carry his bags for him.